NORTHAMPTON — One piece of garbage at a time, Michael Filas has a mission to clean up the Meadows, a vast expanse of property hugging the Connecticut River in Ward 3 where dumping of trash is commonplace.
The 3,000-acre stretch of land near the Northampton Airport on both sides of the interstate stretching from the Oxbow to the Calvin Coolidge Bridge includes some of the city’s most valuable farmland. It’s also a popular area for recreation activities such as walking and birdwatching, not to mention homeless encampments and a site where young people gather to party. In between all these activities, a large amount of waste ends up accumulating in the area.
Filas, a 60-year-old professor of English literature at Westfield State University who lives in Northampton, has been picking up trash in the area for the last three years, oftentimes accompanied by his son, Huxley, his wife Heather and Rafi, the family dog. In the past several weeks alone, Filas and his family have extracted around 380 pounds of trash from the Meadows, and, on their own, paid for its proper disposal. Examples of discovered waste in the area include several heavy objects such as computer monitors, refrigerators and even a bathtub.
In a small wooded area by a body of water that connects to the Connecticut River basin, Filas shows a recent finding of trash collection he has found — glass bottles strewn about the ground, a mattress wrapped around a fallen tree trunk, and tires laying among the fallen leaves.
“It’s a pretty safe bet that along the edge of the Connecticut River, wherever there’s access to the river, there will be bottles and cans of food packaging and other litter,” he says. “It gets into the bushes, and then it takes a bit of an effort to drag it out.”
Filas says the idea first hatched when on a road trip with Huxley to Presque Isle State Park, on the Pennsylvania coasts of Lake Erie. While hiking, they noticed a piece of litter by the water and picked it up. Before they knew it, they had gathered a few bags worth of trash.
“It felt like we left the place better than we found it, and we had a good time together doing it,” said Filas. He compared the activity to looking for shells or shards of glass on a beach. “You can get kind of compulsive about it.”
“It's fun and rewarding to pick up litter,” said Huxley. “It shows how much of a difference you can make.”
Filas held his most recent cleanup of the Meadows last Saturday, where he was accompanied by several other community members, including state Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa. Filas met Sabadosa while the two worked together on the larger Source to Sea Cleanup, hosted by the Connecticut River Conservancy every September, when he told her about his work in the Meadows.
“When you’re walking along together picking up trash, trying to figure out which car is going to hold the greatest number of trash bags, those are the kinds of things you talk about,” she said. “And so he reached out a few weeks ago and said if we brought a team out there, it would be worth the effort before it gets really cold.”
Sabadosa hopes that by bringing attention to dumping in this area to light, cleanup efforts like the one led by the Filas family won’t be as needed.
Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com